Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to multi-threading, and more specifically, to managing multi-threaded operations in a multimedia authoring environment.
Background
In a multimedia authoring system, audio, visual, and interactive assets need to be prepared and multiplexed together to create a package that can be delivered. For the Blu-ray Disc ROM format, each disc may contain one or more clip files, where each clip contains audio, visual, and interactive content multiplexed together. Traditionally, audio, visual and interactive content are added to the clip in sequence, while the author waits for each step to complete before moving onto the next step. This traditional approach was often used in the past due to slow computer performance and very heavy storage input/output load demands usually associated with multimedia content authoring. Additionally, multiplexing a clip is computationally intensive yet it is a sequential process because each video frame's timing and memory management significantly depends on the results of previous frame, thus it does not lend itself well to parallel processing techniques used in other computational intensive applications. However, modern technology now incorporates multiple CPU cores within a single computer, and often times the extra cores are idling during user operation. This new system allows the user and system to continue normal authoring activities and operations without having to wait for each operation to finish.